I Like Watching
"I'm gonna run to the bathroom real quick!"
We'd been deep in a board game when Yumi, clearly desperate, blurted that out and took off at a run. That left just Jiyu and me in the room. I nibbled the snacks on the desk, trying to skate past the awkwardness hanging in the air.
I hadn't meant to think about anything at all, but the comic I'd peeked at earlier wouldn't leave me alone. The kiss scene refused to fade. If anything, it had burned itself into my mind. Jiyu was watching me. She'd been leaning against the bed for a while, and now she crawled over and spoke in a small voice.
"Hana..."
"Uh... yeah? What?"
The heat in Jiyu's eyes made my whole body lock up. She swallowed, hesitated, and finally got the words out.
"You saw it... didn't you?"
I had no idea how she'd caught on, but she was looking at me with the certainty of someone who already knew.
"I... I didn't see it?"
"Liar. Me and Yumi came back, and the book wasn't where we left it."
She pressed me with hard evidence. It felt exactly like a rookie prosecutor in an interrogation room, sliding irrefutable proof across the table at a suspect. I was the suspect. Not that I'd actually committed a crime.
"Jiyu, I respect your taste!"
With every exit sealed off, I chose a frontal assault. Seeing it wasn't the sort of thing anyone ought to get mad or annoyed about. It wasn't as if I'd caught her with something outrageously dirty.
The racier magazines girls passed around went all the way into that sort of territory, so a kiss on the cheek was practically innocent by comparison. Would it be a little different at a boy's house?
Jiyu didn't say another word. Yumi had come back into the room. I never got the chance to answer, and we had no choice but to go back to the board game.
Then, as if the mood from a moment ago had been a lie, Jiyu stuck to me with overwhelming friendliness—just the way she had before I'd looked at the book. I had no intention of outing a friend's taste, so I simply let it pass. Letting it go was the wiser move. Even so, whenever Yumi and I ended up close together, Jiyu seemed to watch us with a pleased little look.
I had to be imagining it.
"Unnie? How did your skin get so much better?"
"Oh my—you don't know Starlight Lotion?"
"What's that?"
"Doesn't your manager bring it to you?"
"My manager only just started. I went without one for a while. The last one quit out of nowhere, and they said it was hard to find a replacement right away."
"Oh my, oh my. Everyone around here is in an uproar because there's no Starlight Lotion to be found, and I never imagined I'd meet a junior this unbothered."
Kim Jina explained the lotion's effects to her clueless junior—a little expensive, yes, but extraordinary for the skin. When she called it the ultimate makeup, the kind that completely took care of blemishes, acne, pigmentation, and most other skin troubles, the girl's eyes went round with shock. Who knew a cosmetic that magical even existed? It hadn't been out long, so of course some people might not have heard of it.
Not everyone kept up with every brand. Still, it was a little deflating that a junior working in the entertainment industry didn't know. No manager or not, how could she be this out of touch with the current cosmetics trend? Kim Jina had always known the girl was a bit slow on the uptake, but she hadn't expected ignorance on this scale.
"Here, try some! Give it a few hours and you'll have skin just like mine."
"Thank you, unnie!"
The junior took the lotion Kim Jina handed her and disappeared—almost certainly headed for the makeup room to put it on. She couldn't apply it right away with her existing makeup still in place. Kim Jina studied her own face in the mirror and hummed, thoroughly pleased with herself.
She prided herself on being top-tier in the industry: looks, talent, proportions, everything. The one thing she could never boast about was her skin. It had been poor since childhood, and no amount of makeup could fully hide that. She disliked it enough for the stress to wear on her. Even at dermatology clinics offering the most advanced procedures, it improved a little and still failed to satisfy her.
Not that her skin was a disaster. Ordinary people, seeing it in daily life, would have called it baby-soft, given how carefully she maintained it. But in an industry where the average was already sky-high, it fell a little short of something she could put forward. After she started using Starlight Lotion, that one and only flaw simply vanished.
Her skin grew brighter and completely clear. Of course, Kim Jina, in her late twenties, didn't suddenly possess the skin of her early twenties. That would have been the realm of rejuvenation. Even so, among women her age, no one else had skin this clean and luminous—true baby skin.
Today, too, she gazed at her reflection, feeling the lotion's effects all over again. At first she had applied it only to her face, but these days she used it over her whole body. Once her face and the skin around her neck were done, the difference against the rest of her felt far too stark. It might have been only in her head, but that was how it felt to her. So she went through an entire bottle of Starlight Lotion a day. Cost didn't matter. One broadcast appearance from a name like hers covered a bottle a day for a whole month.
The one disappointment was a day off when she skipped it and her original skin came right back. That made it plain the lotion wasn't actually curing her, and the nag of it bothered her. The instructions said as much, kindly enough, so it wasn't something to complain about.
If only applying it could erase every skin condition, every blemish... But even Kim Jina didn't think that would ever happen. If a single lotion could wipe out problems like those, what would become of dermatology—and every cosmetics company would collapse overnight. Even now, word was that cosmetics companies and hospitals running dermatology clinics had seen half their sales vanish. Severe scars and cuts didn't disappear completely, so the limits were clear enough.
Still, the effect was outstanding. From the day she became a devoted user, she was able to throw out half the cosmetics in her house, since most of them had only ever served to hide dull skin. Only the products that genuinely improved skin at the root survived. And she hadn't quit the dermatology clinic. Even with Starlight Lotion, the underlying skin that served as your base still mattered.
No matter how good a product was, if your skin had always been poor, the effect was limited. Grandmothers whose faces were creased with wrinkles wouldn't see much from Starlight Lotion—some improvement in the lines, some better skin, sure, but only so much. Kim Jina picked up the spare bottle she had tucked into her bag and thought,
When is the next product coming out?
By now, the frontrunner of Korea's cosmetics industry was Starlight Cosmetics. It hadn't been long since they overtook the other companies, and they had completed the conquest with a single product. The craze was so intense that people were flying into Korea just to buy Starlight Lotion, even though it wasn't sold overseas at all.
"Hana, did you have fun with your friends?"
"Yeah! We played board games, ate yummy snacks, and had a great time!"
Haru came to pick me up at exactly six. I climbed into the passenger seat, buckled my seat belt nice and proper, and we headed home.
"Hana, what's that?"
She must have noticed what I was holding. I held it up for her.
"It's a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur!"
A dinosaur you stuck on the wall—and not just any dinosaur, one that gave off a faint glow in the dark. I'd spent the rest of my money today just to get it.
"Don't you already have dinosaurs stuck up in your room?"
The handful beside my bed wasn't nearly enough. I had to collect more. So I declared it without a shred of shame.
"My goal is to stick up every dinosaur ever discovered!"
"R-right... Won't you run out of wall?"
"You think so?"
Now that I thought about it, Haru was right. The wallpaper was already plastered thick with dinosaurs, and there wasn't much room to add more. Still, the ones I had now would fit just fine.
"Tomorrow's a day off. What are you going to do?"
"I'm gonna catch up on Little Magician Rumi!"
I planned to binge every episode I'd missed while I was out playing. Little Magician Rumi was fun no matter how many times I watched it, and there were still plenty of seasons left. A good anime always gave you something to look forward to.